THAT LIBERTARIAN WELCOME WAGON.

Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds frequently proposes it, and Chicago Boyz contributor T. M. Lutas has been working to implement it.  Meanwhile, National Review contributor Dan "Baseball Crank" McLaughlin interviews Texas Republican operatives who appear to be using the same play-book.

I talked with James Dickey, the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas from June 2017 to July 2020. The answer is not rocket science, but it involved a lot of hard work, careful analysis, and breaking with tradition to meet two goals: recruit a broad pool of attractive candidates up and down the ticket, and aggressively push for the registration of new voters.

Part of the effort is making sure there is a competitive slate throughout the ballot, in order to get voters interested in the top of the ticket.

Candidate recruitment was an important element to winning local and congressional races. Contesting so many races also helped drive turnout of Republican voters in every corner of the state, even in Democratic strongholds. Republicans ran 3,118 candidates across Texas (including candidates for all 36 House seats), compared to 1,873 Democrats, leaving the fewest Democratic incumbents unchallenged in Texas history. Dickey credited Cat Parks (since elected the party’s vice chair) for helping recruit a “young, dynamic, diverse pool of candidates.” The party encouraged candidates and their staff to attend training sessions by the Leadership Institute, and had over 1,300 paid attendees from Texas.

That approach strikes me as so obvious I'm surprised the candidates for national office don't sometimes venture into the states that aren't closely contested.  Let the voters know that the elves at the national networks are racing each other to be first to color in a state on the flimsiest reliable information; they might pay a little attention to Senate and House races, but they're paying almost no attention to the state house let alone the highway commissioner or dog-catcher.  Something along the lines of "we have a good guy for Railroad Commissioner (still an elective office in Texas) and while you're supporting him, stick around to vote for our House hopeful and for our president and vice president ..."

Then comes developing the voters.

Recruiting candidates had not previously happened at that level, but it was not a new task for Texas Republicans. Registering new voters was. For years, the state party did not really consider voter registration its job, contenting itself with organic growth of the electorate. There was, perhaps, a creeping suspicion that maybe the Democrats were right: Maybe it was better not to poke the bear of non-voters, because a real commitment by Democrats to voter registration would swamp any Republican effort. But Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 campaign showed that Democrats were already fully engaged, and Dickey was determined to get Republicans into the voter-registration game, too. In the aftermath of the 2018 election losses in the House and gubernatorial races across the country, the Republican National Committee also got newly serious about voter registration.

That effort includes elements of the welcome wagon idea.

The first step is finding non-voters, including people who may have moved and not updated their registrations. For interstate moves, the national party maintains and circulates quarterly a “new mover list” of people who have filed a change of address and were registered Republicans, voters in Republican primaries, Republican donors, or otherwise identified as likely Republican voters in their old states. On top of that list, the Texas party scours publicly available consumer-data files (magazine subscriptions, credit applications, etc.) to compare with the voter rolls and find adults who were not registered to vote at that address.

The second step is figuring out which of those non-registered voters to target for a registration drive. Some of the markers are easy enough: Donors to liberal causes are unlikely to be Republicans, while people with hunting licenses likely are. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands of data points in the public domain or commercially available data that can be analyzed in combination, and while they may not predict the voting patterns of any individual, taken together, they can provide a highly accurate estimate of likely partisanship across a large group of people. A particular target was the fast-growing areas around Dallas–Fort Worth.

The third step is making contacts: phone calls, mailers, texts. Sometimes people tell the party bluntly that they are not Republicans, but that at least saves labor. At the end of the road, the party signs up new voters and works on turning them out.

A number of these ideas might help shape the planned outreach that's taking shape in the comments to a second T. M. Lutas post. In particular, some of the public source information might help distinguish the people who are fleeing the failed policies of the Democrat states from people who might be moving to that area to colonize it.  New permanent residents are likely to have different attitudes than summer-only residents.

As the point of the welcome wagon isn't necessarily voter mobilization, but rather, making the new residents feel at home with their neighbors and some of the things the neighbors do differently, including politics, and those are things that shouldn't end with a swag-bag.